Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (Russian: Фёдор Миха́йлович Достое́вский; IPA:[ˈfʲodər mʲɪˈxajləvʲɪt͡ɕ dəstɐˈjefskʲɪj];
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11 November 1821– 9 February 1881), sometimes translated Dostoevsky, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist and philosopher. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the context of the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of 19th-century Russia. He began writing in his 20s, and his first novel, Poor Folk, was published in 1846 when he was 25. His major works includes Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). His output consists of eleven novels, three novellas, seventeen short novels and numerous other works. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature. His novella Notes From Underground is considered to be one of the first works of existentialist literature.
Born in Moscow in 1821, Dostoyevsky was introduced to literature at an early age through fairy tales and legends, and through books by Russian and foreign authors. His mother died in 1837, when he was 15, and around the same time he left school to enter the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute. After graduating, he worked as an engineer and briefly enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, translating books to earn extra money. In the mid-1840s he wrote his first novel, Poor Folk, which gained him entry into St. Petersburg's literary circles.
In 1849 he was arrested for his involvement in the Petrashevsky Circle, a secret society of liberal utopians that also functioned as a literary discussion group. He and other members were condemned to death, but at the last moment, a note from Tsar Nicholas I was delivered to the scene of the firing squad, commuting the sentence to four years' hard labour in Siberia. His seizures, which may have started in 1839, increased in frequency there, and he was diagnosed with epilepsy. On his release, he was forced to serve as a soldier, before being discharged on grounds of ill health.
In the following years, Dostoyevsky worked as a journalist, publishing and editing several magazines of his own and later A Writer's Diary, a collection of his writings. He began to travel around western Europe and developed a gambling addiction, which led to financial hardship. For a time, he had to beg for money, but he eventually became one of the most widely read and highly regarded Russian writers. His books have been translated into more than 170 languages. Dostoyevsky influenced a multitude of writers and philosophers, from Anton Chekhov and Ernest Hemingway to Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Beliefs
Political
In his youth, Dostoyevsky enjoyed reading Nikolai Karamzin's History of the Russian State, which praised conservatism and Russian independence, ideas that Dostoyevsky would embrace later in life. Before his arrest for participating in the Petrashevsky Circle in 1849, Dostoyevsky remarked, "As far as I am concerned, nothing was ever more ridiculous than the idea of a republican government in Russia." In an 1881 edition of his Diaries, Dostoyevsky stated that the Tsar and the people should form a unity: "For the people, the tsar is not an external power, not the power of some conqueror... but a power of all the people, an all-unifying power the people themselves desired."
While critical of serfdom, Dostoyevsky was sceptical about the creation of a constitution, a concept he viewed as unrelated to Russia's history. He described it as a mere "gentleman's rule" and believed that "a constitution would simply enslave the people". He advocated social change instead, for example removal of the feudal system and a weakening of the divisions between the peasantry and the affluent classes. His ideal was a utopian, Christianized Russia where "if everyone were actively Christian, not a single social question would come up... If they were Christians they would settle everything". He thought democracy and oligarchy were poor systems; of France he wrote, "the oligarchs are only concerned with the interest of the wealthy; the democrats, only with the interest of the poor; but the interests of society, the interest of all and the future of France as a whole—no one there bothers about these things." He maintained that political parties ultimately led to social discord. In the 1860s, he discovered Pochvennichestvo, a movement similar to Slavophilism in that it rejected Europe's culture and contemporary philosophical movements, such as nihilism and materialism. Pochvennichestvo differed from Slavophilism in aiming to establish, not an isolated Russia, but a more open state modelled on the Russia of Peter the Great.
In his incomplete article "Socialism and Christianity", Dostoyevsky claimed that civilisation ("the second stage in human history") had become degraded, and that it was moving towards liberalism and losing its faith in God. He asserted that the traditional concept of Christianity should be recovered. He thought that contemporary western Europe had "rejected the single formula for their salvation that came from God and was proclaimed through revelation, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself', and replaced it with practical conclusions such as, ' Chacun pour soi et Dieu pour tous ' [Every man for himself and God for all], or "scientific" slogans like 'the struggle for survival'". He considered this crisis to be the consequence of the collision between communal and individual interests, brought about by a decline in religious and moral principles.
Dostoyevsky distinguished three "enormous world ideas" prevalent in his time: Roman Catholicism, Protestantism and Russian Orthodoxy. He claimed that Catholicism had continued the tradition of Imperial Rome and had thus become anti-Christian and pro-socialist, inasmuch as the Church's interest in political and mundane affairs led it to abandon the idea of Christ. For Dostoyevsky, socialism was "the latest incarnation of the Catholic idea" and its "natural ally". He found Protestantism self-contradictory and claimed that it would ultimately lose power and spirituality. He deemed Russian Orthodoxy to be the ideal form of Christianity.
During the Russo-Turkish War, Dostoyevsky asserted that war might be necessary if salvation were to be granted. He wanted the Muslim Ottoman Empire eliminated and the Christian Byzantine Empire restored, and he hoped for the liberation of Balkan Slavs and their unification with the Russian Empire.
Racial
Dostoyevsky expressed antisemitic sentiments, some of which are found in his Diaries, but he also stood up for the rights of Jews. In a review of Joseph Frank's book The Mantle of the Prophet, Orlando Figes states that A Writer's Diary is "filled with politics, literary criticism, and pan-Slav diatribes about the virtues of the Russian Empire, [and] represents a major challenge to the Dostoyevsky fan, not least on account of its frequent expressions of antisemitism." In his foreword for David I. Goldstein's book Dostoevsky and the Jews, Frank tried to paint Dostoyevsky as a product of his time, noting that Dostoyevsky made antisemitic remarks, but was not entirely comfortable with these views.
He supported equal rights for the Russian Jewish population, which was an unpopular position in Russia. He stated that he did not hate Jewish people and was not antisemitic. He claimed that Jews might exert a negative influence, but he advised the Tsar to allow them to occupy influential positions such as university professorships. The antisemitism label does not reflect his expressed desire to reconcile Jews and Christians peacefully in a universal brotherhood of mankind.
Religious
Dostoyevsky was raised in a religious family and knew the Gospel from a very young age. He was influenced by the Russian translation of Johannes Hübner's One Hundred and Four Sacred Stories from the Old and New Testaments Selected for Children (partly a German bible for children and partly a catechism). He attended Sunday services from an early age and took part in annual pilgrimages to the St. Sergius Trinity Monastery. A deacon at the hospital gave him religious instruction. Among his most cherished childhood memories were the prayers he used to recite in front of guests and a reading from the Book of Job that impressed him while "still almost a child."
According to an officer at the military academy, Dostoyevsky was profoundly religious, followed Orthodox practice, and regularly read the Gospels and Heinrich Zschokke's Die Stunden der Andacht ("Hours of Devotion"), which "preached a sentimental version of Christianity entirely free from dogmatic content and with a strong emphasis on giving Christian love a social application." This book may have prompted his later interest in Christian socialism. Through the literature of Hoffmann, Balzac, Eugène Sue and Goethe, Dostoyevsky created his own belief system, similar to Russian sectarianism and the Old Belief. After his arrest, aborted execution and subsequent imprisonment, he focused intensely on the figure of Christ and on the New Testament, the only book allowed in prison. In a January 1854 letter to the woman who had sent him the New Testament, Dostoyevsky wrote that he was a "child of unbelief and doubt up to this moment, and I am certain that I shall remain so to the grave." He also wrote that "even if someone were to prove to me that the truth lay outside Christ, I should choose to remain with Christ rather than with the truth."
In Semipalatinsk, Dostoyevsky revived his faith by looking frequently at the stars. Wrangel said that he was "rather pious, but did not often go to church, and disliked priests, especially the Siberian ones. But he spoke about Christ ecstatically." Both planned to translate Hegel's works and Carus' Psyche. Dostoyevsky explored Islam, asking his brother to send him a copy of the Quran. Two pilgrimages and two works by Dmitri Rostovsky, an archbishop who influenced Ukrainian and Russian literature by composing groundbreaking religious plays, strengthened his beliefs.[128] Through his visits to western Europe and discussions with Herzen, Grigoriev, and Strakhov, Dostoyevsky discovered the Pochvennichestvo movement and the theory that the Catholic Church had adopted the principles of rationalism, legalism, materialism, and individualism from ancient Rome and had passed on its philosophy to Protestantism and consequently to atheistic socialism.
Dostoyevsky's fundamental beliefs remain uncertain, since he never fully stated them. In April 1876, in response to a question about a suicide in Diary of a Writer, he remarked that he was a "philosophical deist"—this was a quote from The Adolescent, though he did not say that it was. But his belief in doctrines such as the Trinity—clearly discussed in The Brothers Karamazov, for example—suggests that he may not have fully understood the meaning of this term. Two months later, he wrote in his Diaries that his heroine George Sand "died a déiste, firmly believing in God and in the immortality of the soul," although deists at that time had a range of beliefs about the immortality of the soul.
From an analysis of religious perspectives in Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov, James Townsend concludes that Dostoyevsky held orthodox Christian beliefs except for his view of salvation from sin. According to Townsend, "Dostoevsky almost seemed to embrace an in-this-life purgatory," in which people suffer to atone from their sins, in contrast with the Christian doctrine of salvation through Christ. Malcolm V. Jones has found elements of Islam and Buddhism in Dostoyevsky's religious convictions.
The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (Russian: Сон смешного человека, Son smeshnovo cheloveka) is a short story by Fyodor Dostoyevsky written in 1877. It chronicles the experiences of a man who decides that there is nothing of any value in the world and is therefore determined to commit suicide. A chance encounter with a young girl, however, begins the man on a journey that re-instills a love for his fellow man.